A childhood love of drawing led to Sheila Gill’s enduring curiosity for capturing the beauty of landscapes and seascapes, as Steve Brown discovers
On a lovely sunny day, I had the pleasure of visiting Chesterfield-based artist Sheila Gill at her home and studio, which looks out over a garden that is clearly a source of deep joy and creative inspiration.
Flowers of every colour jostle among swathes of green, all presided over by a magnificent centuries-old oak whose broad boughs stretch out like protective arms. Art may be Sheila’s first love, but the garden runs it a close second – and she admits that, on a day like this, the pull of the outdoors can prove irresistible, the paintbrush quietly surrendering to the trowel and secateurs.
After a long and richly varied life, she has more than earned those moments of indulgence.
Sheila grew up in South Yorkshire, where her family owned the local corn merchants, trading along the canal. Home was a rural bungalow beside the water – a life without electricity, without television and without many of the conveniences we now take for granted.
She and her older brother made their own entertainment and Sheila found hers in the surrounding countryside, always with a sketchbook to hand. That habit has never left her.
That early love of drawing sparked a childhood ambition to work as a cartoon artist for Walt Disney. Real life, however, had other ideas.
On leaving school, she trained as a dental nurse before moving into pharmacy, where she met her future husband, David. He managed the Jesters Cabaret Club in Mexborough, a sister venue to the old Aquarius on Sheffield Road in Chesterfield, part of the Punch Bowl Entertainments Group.
They met many famous artists (The Drifters, Bob Monkhouse, Ken Dodd, BBC Orchestra, Roy Castle and Eurovision Song Contest winners Brotherhood of Man, to name but a few, and together they went on to run a string of similar establishments across South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire.
That journey eventually brought them to Chesterfield’s edge. It was there, with their two children growing up, that they made the decision to step out from working for others and build something of their own.
Throughout those busy years as a mother and a manager, Sheila had never stopped drawing, slowly improving her skills and finding her unique style – and a business opportunity began to take shape around the thing she had always loved most.
David sold his business and threw his support behind her, helping with the technical side of running two websites and printing textiles, stationery and giftware. After a lot of hard work, exhibiting at major events (at its peak, 24 a year), gallery appearances, weekend workshops in a village hall in nearby Cutthorpe and the steady spread of word-of-mouth, Sheila gradually built the full-time artistic career she has today.
Originally, Sheila started painting her garden flowers and animals but eventually landscapes and seascapes began to take over.
She and David have travelled widely, both across the UK and abroad, and her collection of sketchbooks bears vivid testament to those journeys. Yet it is the Peak District – right on her doorstep – that remains her heartland. Whether she’s slipping out to Linacre Woods and its reservoirs or striking out into the wilder reaches of the High Peak moors, her love of this landscape finds its way into every painting: its shifting moods, its colours, its seasons.
While photographs can serve as reference points, Sheila much prefers to work from her sketchbooks, beginning her interpretations in the field rather than the studio, where, as she puts it, you can “tighten up.”
Out in the open, she looks hard and looks closely – rocks, she points out, are never simply grey, but carry many colours, some seen and some imagined. She actively welcomes dramatic weather, often finding more to paint in a stormy sky than in the flat blue stillness of a perfect summer’s day.
With an early background in science, Sheila retains a fascination with the chemistry and alchemy of watercolours, her preferred medium. She speaks of the way the paint moves and finds its own path across the paper, almost as if it paints itself.
The luscious, buttery texture of oils has become a more recent journey. She has also begun exploring abstracts using collage and gold leaf, a sign of the openness she now brings to her practice.
There is space in her life to experiment, to visit exhibitions and galleries, to follow her curiosity wherever it leads. The road ahead, as Sheila sees it, is one of continued exploration: an artist free to discover herself on her own terms, and to enjoy the journey.
And, of course, to tend her garden. You can see more of Sheila’s work at www.sheilagill.co.uk